Something is wrong with apple and its partners. I got watch 3 today. It asked me to call the f’ing phone company to add watch to the plan. Waiting on the phone for 48 min - the pairing with phone is now lost! Wtf? Who writes software for this company?

Having spent a month since the launch of the handset reminding everyone that the screen was ‘all-screen’ and how Apple had managed to remove the bezels, there’s a juxtaposition with the reality. The percentage of surface area occupied by the screen is less than that of the Galaxy Note 8, and the screen’s brightness is lower than that of Samsung’s competing handset.

But when your yardstick is not the competition but previous iPhones ...

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What is clear with the screen is that the inclusion of the forward facing sensors has robbed Apple of a genuine ‘all screen’ forward display. The notch is an obvious iconic element, but one that serves Apple’s marketing first and users second. Most reviewers have suggested that it becomes ‘invisible’ after use, but it is going to remain an awkward reminder that this silhouette is an Apple smartphone’s silhouette. Nilay Patel at The Verge looks at the notch and how it is badly handled in third-party software:

Apps that haven’t been specifically updated for the iPhone X but use Apple’s iOS auto-layout system will fill the screen, but wacky things happen: Dark Sky blocks out half the status bar with a hard-coded black bar of its own, Uber puts your account icon over the battery indicator, and the settings in the Halide camera app get obscured by the notch and partially tucked into the display’s bunny ears. It almost looks right, but then you realize it’s actually just broken.

Apps that have been updated for the iPhone X all have different ways of dealing with the notch that sometimes lead to strange results, especially in apps that play video. Instagram Stories don’t fill the screen; they have large gray borders on the top and bottom. YouTube only has two full-screen zoom options, so playing the Last Jedi trailer resulted in either a small video window surrounded by letter- and pillar-boxing or a full-screen view with the notch obscuring the left side of the video. Netflix is slightly better but you’re still stuck choosing between giant black borders around your video or the notch.

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Apple dropped the home button and TouchID from the iPhone X, as well as forcing the notch onto the screen, just so it could implement facial recognition. In the hands of the tech-savvy reviewers FaceID is getting a tentative thumbs up -- it's great indoors and in dark environments but put it in sunlight or under fluorescent lights and the accuracy drops. You also need to have the sensors in a ‘sweet spot’ close to your face.